can be rightly known
except relatively under conditions. An ancient philosopher indeed
started a philosophy of the relative, but only as an enigma. So the
germs of almost all philosophical ideas were enfolded in the mind of
antiquity, and fecundated one by one in after ages by the external
influences of art, religion, culture in the natural sciences,
belonging to a particular generation, which suddenly becomes
preoccupied by a formula or theory, not so much new as penetrated by a
new meaning and expressiveness. So the idea of 'the relative' has been
fecundated in modern times by the influence of the sciences of
observation. These sciences reveal types of life evanescing into each
other by inexpressible refinements of change. Things pass into their
opposites by accumulation of undefinable quantities. The growth of
those sciences consists in a continual analysis of facts of rough and
general observation into groups of facts more precise and minute. A
faculty for truth is a power of distinguishing and fixing delicate and
fugitive details. The moral world is ever in contact with the
physical; the relative spirit has invaded moral philosophy from the
ground of the inductive science. There it has started a new analysis
of the relations of body and mind, good and evil, freedom and
necessity. Hard and abstract moralities are yielding to a more exact
estimate of the subtlety and complexity of our life. Always, as an
organism increases in perfection the conditions of its life become
more complex. Man is the most complex of the products of nature.
Character merges into temperament; the nervous system refines itself
into intellect. His physical organism is played upon not only by the
physical conditions about it, but by remote laws of inheritance, the
vibrations of long past acts reaching him in the midst of the new
order of things in which he lives. When we have estimated these
conditions he is not yet simple and isolated; for the mind of the
race, the character of the age, sway him this way or that through the
medium of language and ideas. It seems as if the most opposite
statements about him were alike true; he is so receptive, all the
influences of the world and of society ceaselessly playing upon him,
so that every hour in his life is unique, changed altogether by a
stray word, or glance, or touch. The truth of these relations
experience gives us; not the truth of eternal outlines effected once
for all, but a world of fine gr